Léa Seydoux plays a star television anchor whose life comes unraveled in Bruno Dumont’s new film.
Very often in Bruno Dumont’s “France” — so often that I gave up trying to count — he zooms slowly in on Léa Seydoux’s face, sometimes capturing a tear making its way from one of her blue eyes down the sculpted planes of her cheek.
For cinephiles of a certain temperament, the shot will evoke exalted moments in movie history, for instance the silent images of Maria Falconetti in Carl Dreyer’s “Passion of Joan of Arc.” Falconetti’s silent, tear-streaked visage has been taken as evidence of the spiritual power of film. In exploring the beauty and singularity of a face, the camera can also disclose the anguish of a soul.
But some of Dumont’s zooms have a more profane, or at least a more worldly connotation. Seydoux’s character, France de Meurs, is a popular television anchor and correspondent who hosts a nightly news show that ends, as such broadcasts typically do, with a close-up. To some extent, “France” — the movie and its possibly allegorical heroine alike — is structured around the tension between the banality of television and the sacredness of cinema, and around the difficulty of telling them apart.
“You’re becoming an icon,” France’s producer — a chain-vaping, scene-stealing comic foil named Lou (Blanche Gardin) — enthuses, using the word in the usual secular way, as a synonym for celebrity. But Dumont is also interested in an older, overtly religious meaning. An icon is more than a picture: It’s a pictorial incarnation of holiness.
The irruption of the divine into ordinary life — sometimes sublime, sometimes violent, sometimes absurd — has preoccupied this director for much of his career. In addition to two historical features about Joan of Arc, he has made films set in contemporary France (including “The Life of Jesus,” “Humanité” and “Hadewijch”) that vibrate with metaphysical implications. They can be brutal, unnerving and also puzzling.
“France” is all of those things, but also curiously slack, especially as France spirals through a series of personal and professional crises. The first of these — the least dramatic but also, for her, the most consequential — occurs in the midst of a Parisian traffic jam, when her car strikes a deliveryman’s motor scooter. He is knocked down, and something is knocked loose in her. Desperate to atone, she gives money to the man’s family that they never asked for, and buys him a new scooter once he has recovered from his injuries.
It isn’t enough. Or maybe her emotional turmoil has another source. France is married to a dour novelist (Benjamin Biolay), and lives with him and their obnoxious young son (Gaetan Amiel) in a pretentiously decorated Paris apartment. For a while, she leaves them, and her job, for an old-fashioned rest cure at an Alpine spa. There, she meets a mopey young man (Emanuele Arioli) who claims to be a professor of Latin.
In the second part of the movie, dramatic incidents pile up, as France suffers danger on the job, romantic betrayal, tabloid scandal and devastating tragedy. The close-ups continue to accumulate, the discreet tears sometimes blossoming into full, face-contorting sobs. But while France remains interesting, thanks to Seydoux’s tough and resourceful performance, “France” loses its emotional force and its intellectual focus. A potentially insightful exploration of the loss of self in a media-saturated world amounts, in the end, to a series of shallow images.
France
Not rated. In French, German and English, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 13 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
